The White Russian (15 page)

Jean

‘Are you insane? Sneaking out on your own like that, running all kinds of risks, and for what?’

Father was at his desk with his head in his hands. He looked like a child who hasn’t been able to resist doing wrong: shamed to have been caught, but still defiant.

I stopped. I took a deep breath. I was right to be angry. I loved this man. I had no one else. He shouldn’t have been hiding from his security men and going off alone. But it wasn’t doing any good raging at him. He appeared … well, I took a more careful look … just exhausted, maybe, but greyer and more wrinkled somehow, too. Old.

‘She was a neighbour,’ was all he said. ‘I owed her that respect,
sharik.
I can’t stop being a human being altogether, just for the sake of politics.’

He looked up cautiously. I knew, from the use of that childhood pet name, ‘little ball’ – I’d been fat, apparently, as a toddler – as well as from his timid glance, that he’d sensed I might soften and was trying to appeal to my affection. He wanted me to shrug and smile and say, Oh, well, let’s put it down to experience.

‘Did you at least leave a note, like I always tell you to?’ I said, less harshly, but still not letting go of my anger altogether. ‘Like Kutyopov’s, only with proper information?’

When General Kutyopov had disappeared, the police detectives had only had one clue to follow. There’d been a note in the diary in his desk, saying he was worried about the secret agent whom Skoblin had him down to visit that morning. But Kutyopov had written no more about where the meeting was supposed to be, or who the agent was. And Skoblin then told the police that the man, who, he said, must have been a double agent, had disappeared, leaving no trace. No wonder the investigation had got nowhere.

When Father took over the job, he’d made it the organization’s policy that he and all future White military leaders should be properly guarded. Much more reluctantly, he’d also made me a private promise: that, if he
were
ever to go out alone, in some emergency, he would leave a detailed note of where he was going, whom he was meeting, and why. He didn’t like the idea. He wasn’t a detail man. But I’d insisted, and he’d given in.

Or had he? Looking at him now – at the lowered eyes, and the tired skin – I could see, without waiting for his answer, that, no, he
hadn’t
left any notes yesterday.

‘Father,’ I said reproachfully as he shook his head.

‘Look, nothing bad happened,’ he muttered, letting his head droop on to his arm. ‘I was a fool. I took five minutes of freedom. I won’t do it again. There’s no need for distress.’

But when I let my footsteps take me round to his side of the desk, and put an arm round his shoulder, I could see his cheeks glistening.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, indistinctly. ‘I’m just tired. All those celebrations, earlier this week. They take their toll.’

Awkwardly, I gave him a sideways Cossack embrace. I could hear this was more than just tiredness. He’d never said anything that suggested discontent with his life the way ‘five minutes of freedom’ had sounded, just now. I’d never seen tears in his eyes before.

This first glimmer of understanding that Father might, just possibly, also feel trapped in the role Fate had picked for him to play was baffling, because he was completely absorbed by his life at ROVS – wasn’t he? He didn’t have time for friendships outside this apartment – did he?

But if he was so happy, why had he wanted to go to the funeral of the American woman upstairs?

I squeezed his shoulder harder. ‘I don’t want you kidnapped,’ I said.

The next thought that came to me displaced Father’s cigar smell altogether. Another scent came into my nostrils instead: the elusive half-flower, half-innocent perfume of the American grand-daughter, with her lovely face, her painful naïveté and her foolish quest for a man called Yevgeny. Maybe, I was thinking, she hadn’t been so wrong. And I’d been rude. Maybe – the idea surprised me, but wasn’t displeasing – I should apologize.

I tried the girl’s door, one floor up, before leaving. But the housekeeper said Mademoiselle had just popped out in the car.

That evening, after I’d woken up, and the old nurse had brought me a cup of tea and a rusk on my divan, and got me to wheel poor Katerina Ivan’na – which is what she
went on respectfully calling Father’s wife, even now, when the poor woman was long past recognizing any of us, or appreciating her respect – out on to the balcony for some fresh air, I went to pick Father up. But first I tried the girl’s bell again.

Her new-world enthusiasm had jarred on me, but maybe that said as much about me as it did about her? I’d wanted to think of her as a spoiled American heiress, refusing to take no for an answer, but she was better than that. She was just trying to carry out the last wish of an elderly person whom she’d loved and wished to know better. She was trying to show respect. And what was wrong with that?

I rang three times. There was no answer.

After I’d waited a long time, and not much liked the thoughts crowding into my head – pictures of her out dancing with smug Americans in the smoke and jazz and crush of Zelli’s – I pressed Father’s bell instead, and drove him home.

When I’d left him on the balcony, next to Katerina Ivan’na, I went out for the night in the taxi, but as I did so I looked back up. There they were, on the balcony. He had an arm around her shoulder, and he was staring at the sky. His cheeks were wet.

She’d been gone for years. She couldn’t walk or talk. She couldn’t die, either. Poor Katerina Ivan’na. Poor Father too, I thought. He looked after her so carefully. Why had I never thought how lonely he must be?

He could so easily have been close to the American woman, I thought. I couldn’t help hoping, suddenly, that he
had
found love up those few stone steps from his office, on the first floor.

It was nonsense, of course, what that girl had been saying about her grandmother thinking that Father might need protecting. After all, he had me. But how I wished now that I’d agreed to read the letters she’d talked about – because it now seemed possible that they might show me whether, if there really
were
some flesh-and-blood Zhenya in the American woman’s life, it was Father.

I’d try her bell again in the morning, I thought, as I opened the taxi door.

I drove around all night with the unfamiliar feeling that, for once, my misery was of my own making.

I’d messed everything up with my savage tongue and my quick temper. I always did.

But when I got to the rough café where I always stopped in the pre-dawn hours, already full of loathing for everything I would find in it – for it was many years since I’d found any tragic charm in the dark poetry of human perdition – the American girl I’d been thinking about for so many hours was sitting at the bar.

It seemed so unbelievable that she would be here that, for a moment, I blinked, in case she just vanished. Rich girls didn’t come to places like this. Everyone (except me) stayed in their own fixed orbit. I knew that. I’d known it for years.

But nothing changed when I opened my eyes again. Her golden curls were still bobbing above the heads of Monsieur Martini, completely drunk by now and only an hour or so away from being ejected on to the street, and of Suzanne, with her rough white-blond hairdo and gold teeth, having a night off, perhaps, from the
maison de passe
where she’d recently found grander employment, and of the middle-aged woman with grey hair sitting quietly with that familiar big oilskin shopping bag, waiting for her clients, and of the cloth-capped heads of the other drivers playing cards while they waited for the dawn train. There was a glass of milk in front of her.

There’d been so many times when I’d taken each of these people to task for the way they were ruining their lives. Monsieur Martini, for instance, who taught classics and lived out of town with his wife and six children: I’d once told him he shouldn’t be sitting here once a week spending his two hundred francs on so many drinks that they put him in the gutter at dawn, but he’d only laughed and reproached me for my bourgeois mentality. ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t you understand that you’ll end up in a hospital bed with DTs?’ I remembered bawling as he downed another Martini. But all he said back was:

‘You don’t understand the essence of Gallic philosophy.’

‘What?’ I replied, astonished.

‘Yes,’ he repeated, filling his pipe. ‘Life is given to us for pleasure.’

I’d also outraged the old lady who owned the café, the one now chatting with Evie, who had accumulated a substantial fortune long ago, but couldn’t stop working. Yet how indignant she’d been when I’d told her that, however much she prided herself on her industriousness, the truth was that her life was as pointless as Monsieur Martini’s; how furiously she’d bawled back at me, ‘How can you compare me to that alcoholic?’

Perhaps I’d been fully corrupted since then. But, at any rate, I felt no desire at all to protest at any of my bar
acquaintances’ depravity tonight as I passed between them, heading straight for the long stretch of zinc and Evie.

She only turned when I was almost touching her. There was a cautious look on her face.

‘There. Just as I told you, see? Regular as clockwork, he is,’ the café owner told her calmly. She was looking more like a benign witch than ever. She plunked down another glass of milk at the counter for me. Turning to me, she said, more kindly than I’d have expected, ‘I gave her what you have, milk.’

Then she removed herself a metre or so down the bar, and started polishing glasses, though of course I knew she was listening. They all were.

I picked up my milk and examined it carefully. The mere fact that Evie had left her rich Paris where she must feel at home to enter this other world had impressed the hell out of me. And there were so many other reasons why I wanted to be different, and gentler, with her, now, too. But I wasn’t quite sure how to begin, with all those eyes on us. ‘I really never thought’, I said, quietly, so the café owner would at least know not to join in, ‘that you’d come
here
.’

Another line from Tolstoy came beating through my head: ‘He knew she was there by the joy and terror that took possession of his heart … Everything was lit up by her. She was the smile that brightened everything around.’

Evie’s slow, relieved smile filled the room. With a pang of mortification, I realized that she’d expected me to be angry again.

Without my meaning it to happen, my face softened into a smile, too.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ I heard myself saying, with
something strangely like the joyful innocence I’d thought, until then, only happened in films, or dreams, or other people’s lives. She raised an encouraging eyebrow. ‘I’ve been hasty … and I’d like to … I mean, it seems to me that you might be right, and the Zhenya you were talking about might be my father …’ She leaned closer. I took a deep breath and started again. ‘You need help with those letters, don’t you?’

I didn’t expect her to blush. But her cheeks stained red instantly and she lowered her head.

‘Well,’ she stammered, and picked up her own milk glass again, looking suddenly so embarrassed that the sentimental film music playing in my head went discordant and jangly. ‘Yes, but …’

I waited, baffled.

‘Maybe it would be better if you would help me find someone else …’

‘Why?’ I said, astonished. ‘I wouldn’t want money for it, you know.’

She just shook her head, hastily, as if to say: Oh,
that
, I realized right away that it was a mistake to offer to pay you; let’s not even talk about
that.

‘Well, then, what?’ I said.

She looked at me imploringly from under her lashes. ‘Because if your father
is
the Zhenya she was talking about,’ she said at last, ‘then their … friendship … must have been a secret between them. And if the letters she’s kept are from him, then I’d be showing you his secrets if you read them. And if they’re secrets that would upset you, or maybe
your mother, and cause a problem in your family, it would distress him. And that would be the last thing I’d want.’

She gulped in air. ‘I should have thought more carefully,’ she continued after a moment. ‘I’ve been sitting here realizing how crass it would be. Because I wouldn’t want to make you see your father differently, or embarrass you …’

It nearly knocked the breath out of me, her explanation. She wasn’t angry; she was just trying to protect me. I couldn’t remember anyone taking my possible feelings into this kind of consideration for a long time.

‘You know, we aren’t’, I said cautiously, ‘really that kind of family. It wouldn’t matter.’

Her eyes came up questingly, looking straight into mine. She’d gone pink again. I could see she didn’t find asking straight questions easy.

‘Not’, I added, ‘really a family at all … in your sense of the word. I mean, my father does have a wife, but …’

I paused. I couldn’t think how to describe Katerina Ivan’na.

‘He married her after we’d left Russia … in a refugee camp.’ But even this didn’t convey anything of the pity of it; of
her.
Even when she’d first met Father, in that forlorn barrack outside Constantinople after the retreat, Katerina Ivan’na had been so down on her luck: a widow with drooping hair scraped back in an apologetic bun, whose daughter had died on the way out of Russia; the kind of friendless, influenceless person who was never going to get papers and never going to get away. She earned her crust in the camp by looking after the officers’ paperwork. But she was always quietly weeping into it, until any paper that came out of the cabinets looked blue-streaked and
salt-stained. I think Father just felt sorry for her. He never told me he’d married her out of kindness. He just said one day that they’d gone to the priest, and that when we moved on she’d be my mother. And then, when we did get out – was that to Bucharest or Belgrade first? I could barely remember – we all moved in together. Had they ever even lived as man and wife? I doubted it.

‘She’s an invalid,’ I added. She was lost in transit, I thought. She didn’t know what to do with herself in all those new places. The night we reached Paris, she told Father that she had pins and needles. And then she went to bed, and didn’t get up. We didn’t even realize she was seriously ill, at first. For longer than we should have, we just thought she’d given up. ‘She’s been sick for years. She’s in a wheelchair, and he looks after her. He feeds her; he does everything.’

Evie nodded sympathetically. ‘She’s not your mother?’ she asked softly.

I shook my head. I’d tried calling Katerina Ivan’na ‘Mother’; still did sometimes. I’d been – what? – eight, nine, ten, not far off her dead daughter’s age, when we started living together, but she’d never mothered me. I’d never expected her to.

‘So … what happened to your real mother?’ Evie whispered. Her voice was careful, as if she was afraid the memory would make me weep.

‘No idea,’ I said baldly, and I was surprised how much pleasure I was suddenly taking in talking about myself. I never usually told people this, or, in fact, anything much about my family. ‘Because
he’s
not my real father either. I was an orphan, in a little place with a difficult Russian
name you won’t be able to pronounce, and even I can’t remember properly, with lots of Zs – near Kursk – and hungry; we all were. We spent our days out in the woods looking for food, and his regiment was there. So I became what Russians call a “son of the regiment” – haunted their encampment, ran errands, blacked the soldiers’ boots, smoked their cigarettes to make them laugh – anything for a kopek or a bit of potato. When they left I followed. I loved being one of the strong men, not the victims. And when we got to Constantinople, my father told the camp authorities I was his son, which meant I got papers. God knows what would have become of me otherwise. He educated me and everything, too, along the way. He’s a good man. Kindness’, I added, taking strength from the thought, ‘is his besetting sin.’

‘How old were you?’ Evie asked faintly.

‘Oh, five or so, at the beginning, when I was running wild in the woods,’ I said, rather enjoying her shock. ‘Though by the time we got to Paris I was eleven. There are a lot of Russian “families” like us, you know. That’s just how things are, when you get survivors clinging to the wreckage. You can’t choose who else is holding on to the same spar.’

She nodded.

‘So you see,’ I finished, ‘it wouldn’t upset me in the least if those letters showed my father was close to your grandmother. A White officer taking on a wolf-boy from the woods: I already know he’s always been good at finding love in unexpected places. I’d be happy for him.’

She looked at me for a moment longer, then nodded again.

I thought she was going to praise Father’s charitable instincts and loving nature. I hoped she was. I was all ready to nod and smile bashfully – another new departure.

But all she said was, ‘Well, he made a good investment in you, I’d say.’ That startled me. ‘Because you’re so loyal to him, I mean,’ she added hastily. ‘Loving son. Breadwinner. Bodyguard. You do it all – much more than anyone else I know does for their family, and certainly a hell of a lot more than I do for mine. Where would he be without you?’

It was possible she’d blushed. I couldn’t tell. I’d gone too hot and red in the face myself at the frank admiration in her voice to be able to look properly for a moment. I picked up my milk glass – there was no point in turning into an alcoholic like everyone else in here – and drained it. At my side, I heard her doing the same.

It was a while before I heard her put her glass down. Her voice was muffled. ‘So, about the letters: if you really mean it, when do we begin?’

The sky was lightening, and there were pink streaks on the horizon as I drove her home, and, in the quiet streets, the first scrapings and bangings of deliverymen trundling the day’s barrels and boxes into doorways.

‘Where did you live before the soldiers came?’ she asked, companionably, in the taxi. She sounded muffled by now, as though she were fighting sleep. Unlike me, she wasn’t used to being up all night. For the first time in years, I found myself wondering what it would be like to be awake by day.

‘In an orphanage. Well, a kind of orphanage. A nunnery, really.’

She made a little sound of enquiry.

‘It wasn’t bad,’ I said. ‘Well, it wouldn’t have been if it hadn’t been for the war, and being hungry all the time. The nuns weren’t unkind. I was lucky. They’d kept me after they found me in the woods when the other war was still on, the one with the Germans. And the Germans had left them pretty much alone. I was just a little kid when they found me, they said – so young that I couldn’t even walk properly yet. They kept me a few years before I went off with Father and the regiment. They called me sharik. It means “little ball” – Father still calls me that, when he wants to get in my good books. Apparently I’d had a knitted ball tied to my wrist when they found me – a toy that must have been a nice light colour once, they told me; but it was so encrusted with dirt by the time they found me that they just cut it off and threw it away. Mothers tied toys to their children all the time: there was less chance of losing the toys if you had to pick the child up and run. But the nuns used to have a joke about how I’d really been given that nickname because I’d been such a fat toddler …’

‘Mmm,’ she said drowsily.

The pink on the horizon was tinged with gold. The birds were singing.

‘I knew it must be a joke,’ I went on, ‘even then, because I was so thin. We all were. Like skeletons. All I ever thought about was eating.’

There was silence from the passenger seat. I glanced around. She was breathing very softly, and asleep.

It didn’t matter. We could read the letters later. The important thing was that we’d agreed.

I touched her arm. She stirred. ‘You’re home,’ I said
gently. ‘Get some rest now. You’re tired. I’ll come before work, this afternoon. I could stay an hour …’

She nodded, dazedly. Long after she’d gone in and I was on the road again, to pick up Father, I was still treasuring the look of trust I’d surprised in her eyes. I was astonished, too, that I’d had the presence of mind to resist that overpowering urge that had come over me, just for a moment when I’d watched her sleeping, to kiss her.